I told her about the fight; she nodded approvingly of the way I’d handled it. “The school doesn’t care if those girls play or not. Or even if they attend—under No Child Left Behind, Celine Jackman is dragging the test scores down, so they’d have been just as happy if you kicked her out, but basketball’s her lifeline. Don’t let her get suspended if you can help it.”

She stopped to catch her breath, then added, “You’re not making any of that tofu slop, are you?”

“No, ma’am.” When I first started cooking for her, I’d tried making her miso soup with tofu, thinking it would be easier for her to digest, and maybe help her get some strength back, but she’d hated it. She was a meat-and-potatoes woman through and through, and if she couldn’t eat much of her pot roast these days she still enjoyed it more than tofu slop.

While she slowly ate as much of the meal as she could manage, I went to the bedroom to change her sheets. She hated my seeing the blood and pus in her bed, so we both pretended I didn’t know it was there. On days when she was too weak to get out of bed, her embarrassment at the condition of the linens was more painful than the tumors themselves.

While I bundled everything into a bag for the laundry service, I glanced at the books she’d been reading. One of Lindsay Davis’s Roman mysteries. The most recent volume of LBJ’s biography. A collection of Latin crossword puzzles—all the clues were in Latin, no English hints at all. It was only her body that was failing.

When I got back to the kitchen, I told her Rose Dorrado’s story. “You know everyone in South Chicago. You know Zamar? Is he likely to sabotage his own factory?”

“Frank Zamar?” She shook her head. “I don’t know that kind of thing about anyone, Victoria. People down here get desperate, and they do the things desperate people do. I don’t think he’d hurt anyone, though: if he’s trying to destroy his own plant, he won’t do it while any of his employees are on the premises.”

“He have kids in the school?”

“He doesn’t have a family, as far as I know. Lives on the East Side, used to be with his mother, but she’s been gone three, four years now. Quiet man, fifty-something. Last year he donated uniforms to our program. Josie’s mom probably put him up to it. That’s how I met him at all—Rose Dorrado got him to come watch Julia play. That’s Josie’s sister, you know. She was my best player, maybe since you were in school, until she had the kid. Now her life’s unraveled, she doesn’t even come to school.”